Comment by lonjil
3 years ago
The Microsoft patent is for an "improvement" that I don't believe anyone is using, but Internet commentators seem to think it applies to ANS in general for some reason.
A few years earlier, Google was granted a patent for ANS in general, which made people very angry. Fortunately they never did anything with it.
I believe that Google's patent application dealt with interleaving non-compressed and ANS data in a manner that made streaming coding easy and fast in software, not a general ANS patent. I didn't read it but discussed shortly about it with a capable engineer who had.
If the patent doesn't apply to JXL then that's a different story, then it doesn't matter whether it's valid or not.
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The fact that Google does have a patent which covers JXL is worrying though. So JXL is patent encumbered after all.
I misrecalled. While the Google patent is a lot more general than the Microsoft one, it doesn't apply to most uses of ANS.